Chairman, Senate Committee on
Local and Foreign Loans, Senator Shehu Sani, has said sycophancy under
President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration has been elevated to historic
levels.

Sani, who represents Kaduna
Central senatorial district in the National Assembly, stated this while airing
his thought over the undue emphasis of pro- and anti-Buhari cliques within the
federal legislature.

Buttressing his point with the
recent issue of re-ordering election sequence, Senator Shehu Sani told
NewTelegraph newspaper: “The mood in the National Assembly is that the majority
of lawmakers are not happy with the President vetoing the election sequence
bill, and when the majority is not happy, you can predict what the outcome is
going to be.

“The idea that the Senate is
trampling upon the duties and rights of INEC is not true. Nobody is stopping
INEC from fixing dates; all that we are saying is for it to rearrange the order
of elections. And unfortunately, in Nigeria today, everything is now
interpreted on the basis of whether you are for Buhari or against Buhari.

“You can imagine senators who
have won elections on the platform of APC and have worked for Buhari to succeed
as a President, simply because we have a different view with regard to others,
and then they will be tagged as being ‘anti-Buhari’.

“We have reached a point whereby
in the National Assembly today, if you are supposed to eat rice and then you go
ahead to eat beans, if Buhari loves to eat rice, they will say that you are
anti-Buhari. So, the pro and anti-Buhari formula is now applying to people who
are simply exercising their constitutional rights as legislators.

“The only time you are not going
to be considered anti-Buhari is when you agree with everything the Presidency
says, and even go ahead to be sycophantic about it. Then that is when you will
be termed as pro-Buhari or else, any view, any position or anything you do, you
are most likely going to be anti-Buhari.

“In fact, even if you wear
clothes nowadays that doesn’t look like that of Buhari; they will say that you
are anti-Buhari. So, I don’t know how our President from our party will now be
our enemy simply because we say that we don’t agree with him on one issue, we become
anti-Buhari. Now, Buhari that vetoed the position of the Senate, is he going to
be addressed as “anti-Senate or is he anti-National Assembly? The people who
are currently in detention contrary to court orders, is Buhari going to be
called anti-democracy for that? No.

“We have just elevated sycophancy
in our system, up to the position of even undermining the duties of people to
defend democratic institutions. As far as I am concerned, that is my position
on that.

“The only way is that you will be
altruistic in Nigeria for people to understand this re-ordering of elections is
for the National Assembly to come up with a law and say nobody in the National
Assembly should contest election; only people who love Buhari should contest.
Then they will say that National Assembly is altruistic. Otherwise, any action
you take is certainly going to be suspicious.

“Nigerians have been raising
issues of its elections, and this re-ordering is an opportunity for them to
elect legislators they like and also de-elect those they don’t like; and the
only way to go about it is to reorder the sequence of our elections and see how
we can do the elections in peace. If president Buhari is popular with the
people, even if you make his election the last, he is certainly going to win.

“But all that the members of the
National Assembly are saying is elect us or elect us out. This new order will
prevent mass conviction or what they call the bandwagon effect, whereby people
will be elected because Buhari has been elected, and not those they are the
right candidates.”